Investigation of the effect of palliative care on quality of life in elderly patients with advanced cancer

Background: Elderly patients with advanced cancer are usually in the late stages of their lives so that the quality of life (QOL) of these patients and their families may undergo many changes and overshadow the psychological, social and spiritual dimensions. According to the WHO definition, palliative care(PC) can guarantee comprehensive and active care for patients, improve their quality of life, and, if justified, improve their treatment process. PC is an essential part of end-of-life care and focuses on preventing and alleviating patient suffering and providing comprehensive support for the best possible QOL for patients and their families. So we decided to peruse the impact of PC on the QOL of aged patients with advanced cancer.Search Method: In this article, a review methodology was used. the search was performed in Pubmed, Embase and Web of science without any restrictions. The main terms analyzed were "palliative care", "quality of life", "elderly" and "cancer". Fourteen studies met the inclusion criteria in this study.Finding:. According to the results of the reviewed articles, PC could obviously enhance the short-term curative effect, and improve the survival rate as well as the QOL of elderly patients with malignant tumors and thus enabling the patients to die with dignity. Furthermore, to improve the QOL in these patients, nurses and practitioners should pay attention to vulnerabilities and concomitant comorbidities in oncological patients and ensure timely palliative integration, so that quality of life can be experienced to the end. Also, regional variation appears to play an important role in this population.Conclusion: The findings demonstrated that early palliative care led to significant improvements in both the QOL and mood in older patients with the advanced cancer. The positive effect of PC on improving elderly patients` condition is proposed as a promising direction for future research.

کلیدواژه ها:

palliative care ، quality of life ، elderly ، cancer